We spoke with two of our partners, Steven Deheeger, Senior Program Manager at City Harvest and Rae Gomes, the Food Justice Coordinator at the Brooklyn Neighborhood Health Action, about what dominant narrative they wish they could dismantle and what are alternative narratives they'd like to see more of.

1)   What's the dominant narrative about hunger that you wish you could dismantle?

T hat hunger can and should be understood and approached on an individual level.  Thanks to the myths of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and rugged individualism, lots of dominant narratives in the United States focus primarily, if not exclusively, on individuals. Our dominant narratives about hunger often lead with the number of people who are "hungry" rather than addressing which communities are most disproportionately impacted and why. Narratives that don't ask "why?" invisibilize (and effectively perpetuate) the very systems of oppression that cause hunger in the first place. Queer and trans Black women disproportionately face the highest rates of food insecurity in New York - we need to do a better job of uplifting narratives that center how systemic transphobia, anti-Black racism, and capitalism are systemic root causes of hunger.

2)   What's an alternative narrative you'd like to see more of?

I think the narratives are out there, it's just that we, as nonprofit organizations, need to better about lifting them up. Instead, we often whitewash them - pun intended. The Black Youth Project 100 has a Black Queer Feminist Lens that I think we can all benefit from. Lately, I've been thinking about how organizations that are not led by people most impacted can get behind, support, resource, align with, be accountable to, and organize alongside those that are.  I'd love to see more folks trying to end hunger by centering the narratives that are already out there.

1)  What's the dominant narrative about hunger that you wish you could dismantle?

When examining health disparities in underserved communities, the term 'food desert' is usually invoked by advocates as a reason for food insecurity or a lack of access to healthy food in those communities. Food deserts are defined by the USDA as "low access community, [where] at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract's population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store." The framing is problematic in two ways. While access to food could simply mean distance to a grocery store, a more expanded definition would take into consideration whether the community could easily source fresh, good quality, and affordable fruits and vegetables. With the popularity of food delivery service and meal kits, access to good quality produce could be overcome, only if you could afford it. Also the USDA's definition doesn't take into consideration the availability of other food sources including community gardens, Community Supported Agriculture, and farmers markets. Secondly, the definition and resulting framing point to the lack of supermarkets as the problem. The given framework is that more supermarkets should mean more access to food. In neighborhoods considered "food deserts," supermarkets are sometimes over-priced with produce that is not good quality. Having more supermarkets in a community has not solved the food deserts, even within the accepted framing.

2) What's an alternative narrative you'd like to see more of?

We need to see that food deserts, unlike its naturalistic name suggests, isn't natural, and that food apartheid is a more fitting explanation. Food apartheid is an intentional system of inequity, whereby residents could live in the same area (a designated "food desert" for example) and have different experiences sourcing food based on their race, income, class, and resources. With a framework that only depends on distance from a food store, the solution to have more food stores has proven, throughout history, to not be successful.